How to use IFTTT to win at social media

How to use IFTTT to win at social media

Dominate Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with automated tasks.

The secret to winning at social media is being, or at least appearing to be, constantly present. As in, never sleeping, never eating (unless you're Instagramming that food, I suppose), never taking a bad selfie, and never doing anything except Tweeting every second of your life.

The easiest way to cultivate a flawless online presence is to hire someone else to do it for you. But if you're not a Kardashian, you probably don't have the funds to pay a PR person, so instead there's IFTTT -- a handy little automation tool that can help you stay on top of the eight different social networks you manage on a daily basis.

IFTTT, which stands for If This Then That, is a tool that automates tasks using triggers and actions. IFTTT connects two services, and then triggers an action on one service when you perform an action on the other service. It works with all of the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and YouTube.

The key to successfully using IFTTT with social media is to avoid overusing it. If you use IFTTT to automate every single thing you post to social media, you will quickly start looking like a spambot. I like to avoid any IFTTT recipes that trigger automatic replies -- for example, there's a recipe thatautomatically tweets a thank you message every time you get a new Twitter follower. To me, this kind of automatic thanking reads as disingenuous, and it also has the potential to backfire.

But so long as you don't think of IFTTT as a full-time human personal assistant, you should be fine. Here are five of my favorite IFTTT hacks for social media:

Post Instagram photos as native Twitter photos

Instagram and Twitter don't play too well together -- when you share an Instagram photo to Twitter from the Instagram app, your meticulously-edited photo shows up as a link in your Twitter stream, not as an image card. With this recipe, your Instagram photos will be automatically posted to Twitter as native photos (just remember to uncheck the "share to Twitter" box in Instagram, or you'll end up sharing the photo twice).

Update your Twitter profile pic when you update your Facebook profile pic

Keeping profile pics up-to-date is a hassle, unless you're using this recipe, which automatically updates your Twitter profile pic whenever it detects a change to your Facebook profile pic.

Photos added to a specific album in iOS automatically upload to Facebook

Instead of tediously uploading pictures to Facebook one-by-one, just add them to a specific iOS album on your phone and they'll magically appear on your Facebook page. To add a photo to an album in iOS, go to open up an album, hit Select, select the photos you want to add, hit Add To at the bottom of the screen, and choose the album you want to add the photos to.

Save your wedding's Instagram hashtag photos to Dropbox

Is it just me, or have weddings gotten super socially-connected these days? This IFTTT recipe works for any custom hashtag you've created (Pro-tip: search for your hashtag before you give it out to people, just to make sure it's unique), and will automatically download any Instagram photos it finds with that hashtag to your Dropbox account.

Automatically wish people happy birthday on Facebook

I don't usually like IFTTT recipes that automatically post without an active trigger, but this is an exception -- after all, you can't really mess up a simple "happy birthday" message on Facebook, right? This recipe actually connects to your Google Calendar and uses any birthdays you have marked there as triggers. This way, you're not constantly wishing your 5,000 Facebook friends happy birthday, and hopefully your real friends are in your Google Calendar.

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Eradicate your egg followers on Twitter with a simple Google Script

Eradicate your egg followers on Twitter with a simple Google Script

With a clever yet simple Google Script, you can identify and remove any Twitter bots that are following you by the default egg profile image they use.

Matt Elliott/CNET

If you'd like to cull your flock of Twitter followers by removing any fake accounts, bots or inactive accounts, have a look at this Digital Inspiration post from Amit Agarwal. He has written a Google Script that scans your Twitter followers and finds those who use the default egg profile picture. The thinking being that any real user on Twitter will have replaced the default egg with a real profile picture.

After the script runs, it will then email you a report in the form of a Google Spreadsheet that shows all of your egg followers with a few columns of useful information, including when they joined Twitter, how many times they've tweeted and how long it's been since their last tweet. Each egg follower on the report features a linked username, which you can click to open their Twitter page, at which point you can block them from following you.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

On Agarwal's post, he provides a link to his Google Script and outlines the four simple steps needed to run the script and generate your egg report. If you have a large Twitter following, it may take some time for the report to show up in your inbox. You'll get an email immediately confirming the report is being generated, followed some time later by the actual report. In my case, it took 13 minutes to scan my roughly 1,500 Twitter followers and identify the 135 eggs that follow me.

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5 tips for finding anything, about anyone, online

5 tips for finding anything, about anyone, online

How to hunt down people -- even if they don't want to be found.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

I think everyone should have decent online stalking skills. Not because I condone stalking, but because knowledge is power -- if you don't know how to find people online, how do you know what people can find about you online?

Googling yourself is like checking your credit report for inaccuracies: it's only effective as a preventative measure if you do it thoroughly and routinely. Whether you're looking for yourself or a friend (no judgment), here are five tips for finding out anything, about anyone, online:

Plug everything you know into Google.

It doesn't matter how little you know about the person you're looking for, your search is going to start with Google. And it should, because Google is a powerful tool (especially when you know how to use it). But if you don't know anything particularly identifying about the person you're looking for (such as their email address), it's better to skip the fancy search hacks and go straight to plugging in keywords. Open up Google and type in everything you know about the person in keyword format; for example, "sarah los angeles writer tech." Even if you only know their first name, keywords related to their job, marital status, location and school will likely bring up social networks or other identifiable results.

Use Facebook's People Search.

If no social networks pop up in your initial Google search, you may need to go into the social networks themselves. Facebook is the most popular social network, and it has the most robust search engine, so you should probably start there. Facebook's People Search lets you search for people by filling in one or more search boxes: Name, hometown, current city, high school, mutual friend, college or university, employer, and graduate school. If you know one or two of these things about your subject, you can narrow down your search and then browse through the photo results.

If your subject has no social media presence, try to find their friends and family members; it's possible they're hiding their account behind a fake name. If you have no idea who their friends and family members are, and you know their full name, use a free people search like Intelius to look up relatives...and then hunt down those relatives.

Make connections.

Individual data points don't mean anything unless they can be connected to other data points to make up a person's online presence. Once you have several facts about your subject, you'll need to use your brain to make connections and fill in the blanks. For example, if you know your subject's name, job title, and location, you can probably find their LinkedIn profile. On their LinkedIn profile, they've probably listed their undergraduate degree and when they graduated from college, which means you can work backward to figure out approximately how old they are.

Remember people are not very creative.

If you can find someone's username, Twitter account, personal email address or YouTube profile, you may have hit gold. People, for the most part, aren't very creative when it comes to mixing up usernames (or passwords), so they've likely recycled that username many times over. Start by plugging their username into Google, but also look through social networks, forums such as Reddit, and blogs for old comments or posts.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

People recycle usernames, passwords, and social media profile pictures. Grab their profile pic from their Facebook or Twitter account and plug it into a reverse image lookup such as TinEye. TinEye will scan the image and then spit back all other instances of that image that it finds on the web -- this is a great way to find now-defunct social media profiles, old LiveJournals, and online dating profiles. You can also use Google Images to do a reverse image search by going to Google Images, clicking the camera icon in the search box, and uploading the image you want to search.

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The Internet will vanish, says Google's Eric Schmidt

The Internet will vanish, says Google's Eric Schmidt

Technically Incorrect: Speaking at Davos, Google's executive chairman explains that we'll all be experiencing our digital connections as a seamless part of our everyday world.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.

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The Internet? It's like a horse-drawn carriage.ZeitgeistMinds/YouTube screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

Digitally speaking, we're not even plodding along yet.

Why, AT&T is throttling my data this month and my phone still won't work too well in half of California's Wine Country.

However, Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, is very well connected to the future. And he'd like you to know that the pesky Internet thing will soon be a digital dodo.

I know this because today he said: "The Internet will disappear." As the Hollywood Reporter offers, Schmidt was schmoozing and strategizing with the hive mind of world leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

He made a few more brushstrokes to contribute to his picture of Futureworld: "There will be so many IP addresses (...) so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with that you won't even sense it."

Surely you will sense it, because you'll find this magical at-oneness with the digital world far more interesting than, say, the humans in a room who are also finding their own magical at-oneness with the digital world.

Schmidt explained: "It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room."

Permit me a dynamic guffaw at the mention of permission. Humanity has long ago bared its chest and dropped its trousers, merely for the opportunity to post images of its tanned toenails and to buy some strawberry-flavored toothpaste.

Just to underline this, the Davos forum also heard from Harvard professor of computer science, Margo Seltzer. The AFP reported two of her more charming statements.

First: "We live in a surveillance state today." Second: "We are at the dawn of the age of genetic McCarthyism."

This latter thought portends a world, she said, where tiny drones are flying through the air checking you for a pox of one kind or another. On behalf of, say, your health insurance company.

All for the greater good, you understand.

Yesterday, with its HoloLens, Microsoft showed one small step toward walking into its version of a dynamic room. Most who saw it found it exciting.

For Schmidt, the idea of a dynamic world represents "a highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world."

Of course we'll rush headlong into it becaus

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